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			<h1>Course registration issues</h1>
			<p>Day 00586: Thursday, 2016 October 13</p>
		</header>
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	Current countdowns:
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	<li>4 days until my old domain registrar can no longer counter my charge dispute</li>
	<li>10 months worth of weblog entries to correct misuse of the <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr> <code>&lt;q/&gt;</code> tag in</li>
	<li>249 scheme-specific <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr>-parsing classes to write and add to <a href="https://git.vola7ileiax4ueow.onion/y.st./include.d/releases">include.d</a></li>
</ul>
<p>
	I took a little break from schoolwork to listen to Josh Woodward&apos;s <a href="https://www.joshwoodward.com/song/LetsSlashGrandmasTires">Let&apos;s Slash Grandma&apos;s Tires</a>, which is hilarious.
	Apparently, it&apos;s about keeping Grandma away from the voting polls on election day by eliminating their transportation.
	On the first listen through though, I was caught off guard by the phrase <q>a woman&apos;s place is in the kitchen</q>.
	I mean, obviously this song is meant as a joke, but did Josh actually say that? It doesn&apos;t seem like Josh at all, and I thought that it lead the song in a completely wrong direction.
	That is, until the next phrase came: <q>that&apos;s what grandma says</q>.
	Now that&apos;s the Josh Woodward that I know and love! Based on the complaints made in the song about &quot;Grandma&quot;, such as that they&apos;re against the Jews and gays, it&apos;s clear that whoever Josh is voting for, it isn&apos;t Trump.
	In other words, Josh actually has some sense, unlike a lot of people.
	I think that the song itself it meant to be candidate-neutral, but you can&apos;t really explain why you want to take away Grandma&apos;s vote without picking a side at least a little bit.
</p>
<p>
	In between reading the webpages that I listed last night for <span title="Online Education Strategies">UNIV 1001</span> study work, I started trying to register for courses for next term.
	I found two major issues though.
	First, the website syas that in order to become a degree-seeking student, I must send in proof of my high school completion.
	I already did that! In fact, I waited until I had received word that my high school transcript made it to University of the People before I completed my enrollment! Second, the courses for me to choose from for next term aren&apos;t helpful.
	The site will only allow me to choose from three different courses.
	Two are the courses that I&apos;m already in, and the last one isn&apos;t needed for my degree.
	I wrote to my program advisor about both issues.
</p>
<p>
	After finishing up the reading materials, I took the ungraded quiz for the week and posted a response to the discussion assignment.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
	Employers are saying that most job candidates lack &quot;superior critical thinking and problem solving skills&quot;.
	On the surface, this seems obvious.
	At the very least, be &quot;superior&quot; at anything, you&apos;ve got to be above average.
	By definition, no more than half of candidates can be superior in a given.
	In this case though, there&apos;s more to it than that.
</p>
<p>
	People are trained from a young age to follow the herd like sheep.
	They don&apos;t think critically, they do whatever seems like the popular thing to do.
	They don&apos;t form their own opinions, they reflect the opinions of others.
	With most people reflecting the ideas of others that are likewise reflecting them, new ideas aren&apos;t often introduced, and when they are, they&apos;re often disregarded due to not yet being the popular way of thinking.
	But how can an idea become popular when it isn&apos;t being given a chance? This obviously causes stagnation in the thought processes of the mindless masses.
	Many real world problems can&apos;t be solved with stagnant ideas.
	After all, if old ideas would have solved the problem, it wouldn&apos;t still be a problem, would it? Many people also like to rely on &quot;gut feelings&quot; and hate to be criticized, which shows that they not only don&apos;t like to think things through, but also don&apos;t like to be told how to better think next time.
</p>
<p>
	Employers are highly justified in making this statement.
	A great example of this is how most people are about religion.
	They use ungrounded &quot;facts&quot; as reasons that a creator must have been involved.
	For example, I&apos;ve had people tell me that science must be wrong, because it says that the earth is a lot older than they think it is.
	Therefore, religion must be right.
	That makes no sense though; they&apos;ve given no evidence to support their theory that science isn&apos;t right about the earth&apos;s proximate age.
	I&apos;ve also frequently heard the argument that someone believes in their religion because they don&apos;t want to go to hell.
	But if there is no hell, you can&apos;t go there.
	Besides, belief doesn&apos;t change reality.
	Most people don&apos;t believe in faeries, but it&apos;s said that if you don&apos;t believe in faeries, they&apos;ll die.
	Does people&apos;s lack of belief in faeries mean that they want faeries dead? No! In fact, you can&apos;t want something to die if you think that it doesn&apos;t exist.
	People make bizarre and irrational justifications for their religious trains of thought without questioning their religion and without questioning their own support of that religion.
	To be clear, I&apos;m not saying that believing in an unprovable god or gods is incorrect.
	After all, it&apos;s just as unprovable that they *don&apos;t* exist! However, taking believes and using them to reject well-evidenced facts is clearly not something with critical thinking skills would do.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
	After that, I graded the notes and essays from last week.
	The grading form for the essay has now been made available, and indeed, it does ask to grade partially based on the word count.
	However, the total word count of that essay that I complained about last night doesn&apos;t meet the word count minimum like I thought that it did.
	I must have counted the words in the wrong essay when I said that.
	I&apos;m not sure what they thought that they were doing, but they answered about half of the questions from each topic, meaning that they didn&apos;t complete either of the two essay assignments that we were offered to choose between.
</p>
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	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
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